New York City's Hart Island: A Cemetery of Strangers

By Michael T. Keene

The story of the nation’s largest mass graveyard and the nearly one million people buried there—based on new documents and advances in DNA technology.

Once a Civil War prison and training site and later a psychiatric hospital, among other incarnations, Hart Island, just off the coast of the Bronx in the Long Island Sound, eventually became the repository for New York City’s unclaimed dead. The island’s mass graves are a microcosm of New York history, from the 1822 burial crisis to casualties of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and victims of multiple epidemics. Among the indigent and forgotten, important artists who died in poverty have also been discovered to be interred there, including Disney star Bobby Driscoll and playwright Leo Birinski.
 
In this wide-ranging exploration touching on many aspects of the city’s past, Michael T. Keene reveals the history of New York’s potter’s field—and the stories of some of its lost souls.
 
Includes photographs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781439668221

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

SUPERSTORM

What would become the largest Atlantic storm on record swirled violently from the Caribbean, creating a devastating oceanic force that at its zenith reached nine hundred miles across and one thousand miles long.¹ This hurricane, or superstorm as it was later characterized, was about to lay waste to the most populated corridor in the United States. This hotter-than-usual Caribbean weather pattern met the icy North Atlantic waters and intensified into a hybrid colossus both tropical and arctic. Perhaps responding to rising global temperatures, or perhaps mythically overdue for a battle with the land, the storm was whirling and building—huge and slow—hundreds of miles out at sea. At one point it exhibited the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded on the Atlantic seaboard.² The first harbinger of destruction was 115-mileper-hour wind gusts.³ Across the eastern United States, people evacuated from the front lines of the inevitable destruction by the millions, responding to nationally declared states of emergency. They bought food, water and fuel and boarded up their homes and businesses, gearing up to sit out the deadliest weather event to ever hit the East Coast. For this monster storm, which would cause $65 billion in damage in the United States and kill at least 233 people,⁴ preparation was futile. For many, the impact of this superstorm would be too great to overcome. The name of the storm was Sandy.

The hurricane made landfall as a category two in Brigantine, New Jersey, bombarding the Northeast with a vortex of wind and water, spreading its massive wingspan to punish communities with rain, snow, flying debris and rising storm surges at quantities and velocities hitherto unseen in this part of the world. After drowning dozens in the Caribbean days before,⁵ Sandy set its sights on the most populated area on the continent, sending surging water up to and beyond thirteen feet in the country’s most storied island: Manhattan. The storm destroyed property, eroded shorelines—in some cases destroying 50 percent of beach sand in barrier islands—dumped ten million gallons of sewage into the water and killed twenty-five people.⁶ Hurricane Sandy revealed deep flaws in one of the world’s greatest metropolises, demolishing long-standing structures and proving that even this pinnacle of society stood no chance against this most ruinous of meteorological events. It took years, but eventually New York recovered.

BONES BEACH

About a mile east of Pelham Bay Park and City Island off the coast of the Bronx lies 130 acres of land known as Hart Island. In April 2018, approximately six years after Superstorm Sandy, an official from the Department of Corrections, which oversees jurisdiction of the island, alerted a well-known Hart Island activist to skeletal remains that had been seen scattered on the beach—some even protruding from the shoreline! After arranging a boat, the activist and a Newsday reporter confirmed and photographed the sighting.

The following day, a forensic anthropologist from the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner conducted an investigation that resulted in the recovery of 174 human bones, including six skulls. The remains discovered that day unearthed a secret kept hidden for more than 150 years. Lying beneath the ground of this nondescript, tiny island were the remains of nearly one million people, who were buried in wide, deep pits dug by convicts from nearby Rikers Island. The dead included stillborn babies, unclaimed paupers, Union and Confederate soldiers, the insane, the addicted and the unidentified. The bones would reveal tales of war, abuse, fraud, epidemic and mental illness, which would tell the stories of New York’s most forgotten people.⁷

After nearly a century and a half, as the result of recent advances in DNA and fingerprint technology and forensic anthropology, and with access to previously withheld burial records, we can identify some of these anonymous lost souls and reveal the hidden history of Hart Island—America’s largest mass graveyard.

1

THE BURIAL CRISIS OF 1822

By the early 1800s, New York City boasted a population of more than two hundred thousand, qualifying it as the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. As New York City’s population grew, so did its number of dead. What has been referred to as the 1822 Manhattan burial crisis evolved into one of the city’s most troublesome and hazardous social frenzies and failings.

The three-hundred-year-old Trinity Church graveyard on two and a half acres of land in Lower Manhattan was the idyllic resting place of many, including Alexander Hamilton after losing his historic duel with Aaron Burr in 1804.

Today, workers in the Financial District may visit the site on breaks or lunch hours for a green, peaceful respite from offices and elevators. But in 1822, no one wanted to stroll through the cemetery. In fact, residents of the neighborhood found other routes to their destinations to avoid the place.

Why was this important in 1822?

The smell.

The all-encompassing stench.

The definitive, pervasive odor of hundreds of decomposing bodies in graves that were hastily interred only two or three feet underground.

The number of interred bodies in Trinity Church’s graveyard in 1822 was estimated at 120,000, but it was just that—an estimate. The truth was that the massive number of bodies buried in that year alone could not be tracked.

July 1822 saw the highest death rates from yellow fever in New York City, particularly in areas south and west of the church. The Common Council and Board of Health passed a resolution in August to prohibit further burials in the graveyard because of vehement complaints of offensive exhalations. Visitors to the church and graveyard, casual passersby and residents in the surrounding streets found the source of the stench unmistakable: the smell of death.

Death’s Head Tombstone in Trinity Church Cemetery. Opened in 1697, Trinity Church remains the only active cemetery on the island of Manhattan. Courtesy of hyperallergic.com.

Dr. Rosa, who was prominent for investigating the causes of the yellow fever epidemic, hired workers to cover the graveyard in quicklime to speed up the process of decomposition. The men worked through the night, retching and heaving from the repulsive task.

How could Trinity Church, along with Manhattan’s twenty-one additional burial grounds, possibly keep up with the city’s rapidly growing death rate? By 1822, Trinity was surrounded by thriving commercial communities, and its modest graveyard barely encased a century’s worth of bodies.⁸

TOO MANY BODIES

New York City was facing an unprecedented crisis at an unprecedented speed. Other grounds within a close radius of Trinity Church—North Dutch Church, Middle Dutch Church and St. Paul’s—faced the same problem.

Burying the city’s dead surpassed the geographical burial boundaries imposed by the city. In 1839, that boundary extended to Fourteenth Street, and by 1859, it expanded uptown to Eighty-Sixth Street. The city also began to bury its indigent dead in potter’s fields outside the city limits in what is now Washington Square Park and Bryant Square. By 1831, two nonsectarian burial grounds were formed: the New York Marble Cemetery in the Bowery and the New York City Marble Cemetery, which was a block away from the first. Multiple stacked burials were created underground in thick family vaults.⁹

Sometimes bodies were buried only eighteen inches underground. People noted that the stench was terrible. Courtesy of New York Public Library.

GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY

In 1878, Green-Wood Cemetery was planned and developed in Brooklyn by David Bates Douglass. It began on 178 acres of land and was later increased by 300 acres. The graveyard was modeled after Mount Auburn in Boston and Laurel Hill in Philadelphia. Douglass, who also served as the cemetery’s first president, designed Green-Wood as the ideal romantic landscape. It was a rural creation of sculpted hills, planted trees and curving paths with fanciful names. In 1876, Harper’s Weekly called Green-Wood the largest and most beautiful burial place on the continent.

Green-Wood also charged for burials, which resurrected the anger of city officials, who maintained that New York City still had not come to terms with burying its indigent and impoverished. In a fiery letter to the editor of the New York Times, these officials described the coffins, skulls, and decayed bodies lying exposed on the corner of 50th Street and 4th Avenue, which was the location of one of the city’s smaller potter’s fields.¹⁰

View from Green-Wood Cemetery, 1881 by Rudolph Cronau. Courtesy of Brooklyn Historical Society.

In 1869, New York City purchased Hart Island as its official public gravesite. The rising number of the city’s dead would be buried well underground. But they would have their own problems—perhaps later than sooner.

One hundred sixty years later, while uncovering the shroud of mystery surrounding the United States’ largest mass gravesite, almost identical descriptions of the ghoulish discoveries in the Trinity Church Graveyard would come to nest on Hart Island, jarring our attention and sensibilities.

HART ISLAND: DOES ANYONE CARE?

In 1775, British naval cartographers chartered what they originally named Heart Island because of its general shape, which seemed to resemble a human heart. Other historic reports claim that the island was named after deer, or harts, hunted there.

It’s ironic that the nature of the business of Hart Island seemed to lack just that: heart—the emotional kind—until a few short years ago, when public outcry brought attention to the severe erosion of gravesites and the subsequent exposure of human remains. Just as a grisly assortment of bones and human skulls seeped out of their resting places, so did the emotions of family members and friends of those buried in the largest potter’s field in America.¹¹

HART ISLAND

By 1798, it was listed on maps as Hart Island and was approximately a third of a mile from the City Island shore. It measured about a mile long by a third of a mile wide at its broadest point.

This island was the ancestral home of the Siwanoy Indians, who first hunted, fished, lived and died there. The land was purchased by Thomas Pell. Upon Pell’s death, the land passed to his nephew, John Pell of England. In 1774, his heirs sold it to Oliver Delancey, a Loyalist politician, soldier and merchant during the American Revolution.

Commanding officers occupied their own cottages and officers lived in a large building at the south end of the island. Every evening at five o’clock, a military dress parade was held here. This space also included a library and a concert room, where musically inclined soldiers performed with the regimental band. The first concert was performed on November 14, 1864.¹²

When visitors and family members of the recruits came to Hart Island, they were required to get a pass from General Dix’s office on Bleecker Street in Lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and had to pay fifty-five cents to board the ferry, John Romer, before it sailed twenty-one miles from the Battery to Hart Island.

Leaving the island was more difficult than landing on it. Visitors were hurried onto their return boat trip as the ferry docked only a half-hour before sailing back to Manhattan. Once travelers accomplished this part of their trip, they would board a tugboat to New Rochelle and hire a rickety carriage at twenty cents per person to take them to the designated railway station in Manhattan. The railway charged fifty-five cents for the next part of the trip to the Twenty-Seventh Street station, which was the last stop. From here, weary riders would disperse before finally reaching their homes. Any leftover enjoyment from a day spent on Hart Island was soon overshadowed by fatigue and empty pockets.

Aerial photo of Hart Island in 1946. Although it is only one mile long and a third of a mile wide, it claims nearly one million mass graves. Courtesy of New York Daily News Archives.

Many soldiers who occupied the island during wartime died in the line of duty, but many also died from disease. They were, of course, buried on Hart Island. In 1916, their remains were removed and reinterred in the Soldiers Cemetery at West Farms in the Bronx. The remains of another group of Civil War veterans were disinterred from Hart Island in 1941 and moved to the Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn, which is the only United States military cemetery in New York City. The remains of more than twenty-one thousand veterans and civilians are buried there.¹³

In 1864, as the Civil War gained momentum, construction of barracks began at the southern tip of the island to hold approximately five thousand prisoners of war. In 1868, the City of New York, under the auspices of the Department of Public Charities and Correction, purchased Hart Island from the John Hunter family for $75,000. The island was used as a training facility for new soldiers. Between two thousand and three thousand raw recruits were initially expected, but more than fifty thousand men ultimately trained on the island.

Forty-five acres at the northern end were designated as a potter’s field in 1869. The first burial would be soon.

2

LOUISA VAN SLYKE

The ship lurched in the heavy North Atlantic swell, its bow plunging deep in the troughs as it pitched sharply. Its seasick passengers crammed into the small hold, clutching anything nearby as they considered their recent decision to leave Europe. A simply dressed young lady was another anonymous face in the crowded ship. She kept to herself, as she’d always done. She was alone, without child or family, as she’d been for most of her life. But the New World beckoned, and in some sense, anything had to be better than what she’d left. She tried to think about that—the rumors she’d heard about New York and this far off place called America. People said that it was different. She tried to focus on that thought as the dim hold rocked to and fro. Above deck, the ship’s crew posted watch, adjusted sails to meet the wind and carried on through the chilly night toward the distant shore.

Her name was Louisa Van Slyke, and little did she know how short her stay would be. In 1869, she would die of yellow fever alone in New York City’s Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island. With no friends or relatives to claim her, she would become the first of almost a million to be laid to rest in the potter’s field on Hart Island.

YELLOW FEVER

In the summer of 1795, New York was struck with an outbreak of yellow fever—one of the first in a long line of infectious diseases that would find their way to a city that quickly was becoming an international beacon for the impoverished. Measures that had been placed on the back burner, as more important infrastructural projects took precedent, now came to the fore, as public welfare and the security of the city became issues of life and death. One researcher noted the time as:

Health was very much a civic issue among the rival Atlantic seaports. Baltimore had a new health committee, new quarantine laws and a hospital at Hawkins Point outside the harbor to receive sick sailors and immigrants. In New York, news that fever had appeared in the West Indies in the spring of 1795, prompted passage of a rule that made the port’s pilots responsible for reporting ships that presented a health hazard. The city also purchased a house called Bellevue about a mile up the East River to serve as a fever hospital. Philadelphia began planning a quarantine hospital south of the city. The College of Physician asked the state legislature to give physicians more control in responding to an epidemic. It predicted that whenever yellow fever broke out in the West Indies, it would get into Philadelphia no matter the precautions. Once in the city it would again be highly contagious.¹⁴

As was the case in the city of brotherly love, what began as a few isolated cases of people touched by the disease’s strange and rapid onset, soon turned into a wholesale outbreak in New York City.

The first reported cases of yellow fever in Philadelphia appeared in 1793. Because the contagion was in such close proximity to New York, the city decided to form the Board of Health Department to systematically assess the risk and spread of the virus. While this was partially successful, by 1795, Manhattan hospitals, like Bellevue, started receiving the first patients whose characteristic jaundiced pallor proved otherwise. It was here, and there was little the city could do besides attempt to contain it. The outbreak lasted until 1803 and varied in severity. It reached

Reviews for New York City's Hart Island

[kurtwombat · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

For nearly a century and a half, Hart Island has been the final destination for New York’s destitute and departed. I first heard of Hart Island while reading Tim Page’s marvelous biography of Dawn Powell. I was fascinated that someone who had some notoriety could still end up in a potter’s field (which I never knew was a biblical reference—land bought using Judas’ blood money to bury the poor once belonged to a potter). Unfortunately, my image of the island remains gauzy even after reading this book. This is not entirely the author’s fault. For most of it’s history, the island has been under the control of either the military or the New York prison system—neither organization has been eager to share information. Even visiting the island was virtually impossible until more recent times—and those visits mostly limited to families of the deceased residing there. The book jumps around in a seemingly random manner which doesn’t help—making the book feel like a series of articles strung together. To compensate for a lack of in-depth information about the island, the book is full of the history of New York—the famous, the infamous, the indigent and the dead. Some of it is fascinating (so much of New York’s expensive real estate sits upon old cemeteries) some of it less so. Apparently over a million have been buried there but throughout the book confusing references are made to other numbers or to simply not knowing a number at all. This also contributes to that feeling of articles strung together. Maybe it’s my natural empathy, but reading this did make me feel the weight of the island. Layer upon layer of stories does partly impress the magnitude of the lives erased from memory upon the reader but that weight alone does not tell the whole story. I wish I knew more.